Learning (and sharing) from like-minded water portals
It's important to learn from other water related portals, and we have been keen to partner and share information with others. Last year we started with publishing Myanmar Water related information from the KINI initiative - Australia Water Partnership onto the Myanmar Water Portal, and vice-versa. This year we connected with the India Water Portal to learn from their 10 years journey of building a credible independent water portal. We are also very pleased to see banners of the Myanmar Water Portal on the Netherlands Water Partnership (NWP) website and on the Myanmar page of TU Delft.
We are very proud to be able to partner with Akvopedia, a free, open-sourced water, sanitation & hygiene resource that anyone can edit. This information will be very valuable for our Myanmar Water stakeholders. In the upcoming period we will introduce this impressive source of information during workshops and meetings. Eventually Akvopedia can be foundational for Community of Practice sessions.
India Water Portal
The India Water Portal is an initiative of Arghyam - a social enterprise / foundation. The initiative started with the ambition to improve coordination between existing and to be developed portals. In the past content contributions are done via a team of internships and volunteers, but now it's much more structured in a working relationships with freelancers. The current team is distributed (de-central), flexible and cross discipline. The key audience are water professionals in the India Water Sector, and secondly (concerned or passionate) citizens who are targeted with awareness campaigns. Social media plays an important role: Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are key platforms. Partnerships with other players are beneficial to share and re-tweet. The India Water Portal developed organically and is focusing on knowledge sharing, awareness campaigns and involvement of citizens with an interest for water - as water issues in India became much more severe. The game-changer was accessibility to the internet – and access to wider eco-systems. The USPs are 1. Link of the portal to an independent credible and sustainable partner like Arghyam, 2. Non-profit (or civil society) organization, 3. Constant focus on credibility and 4. The team of people who drive daily operations for years
2025: Ready to be a societal platform with better access to data. We need to guide the eco-system to do it's work better.
Importance of data and the focus on publication of open-data-sets. Accessibility from Global data-sets to data-sets related to India. So far the business case for portals isn't easy although the importance is growing and growing. Its difficult to invest in knowledge as the question is 'what is happening with the knowledge' and 'what is the concrete impact of a knowledge portal?'.
